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The Man Who Wields a Lead-Weighted Beanbag for Obama

CHICAGO — Almost exactly four years ago, when President Obama was on the cusp of winning the White House, he spoke emotionally about David Axelrod, the strategist who guided him from the Illinois State Senate to the pinnacle of national politics. He praised Mr. Axelrod for his “basic take” on “how politics should be able to draw on our best and not our worst.”

The other day, toward the bitter end of one of the most negatively fought presidential campaigns in modern memory, Mr. Axelrod was asked over breakfast here how that whole thing had turned out.

“I mean, look, what’s the old expression? ‘Politics isn’t beanbag,’ ” Mr. Axelrod said, digging into a greasy egg dish he knew he shouldn’t have ordered but, well, it’s nearly the end and sometimes stress must be fed. Noting that both campaigns have their share of political warriors, he added, “There are no ingénues in this battle.”

For more than a decade, Mr. Axelrod and Mr. Obama have formed one of the most famous partnerships in presidential politics, like those of Karl Rove and George W. Bush, Michael K. Deaver and Ronald Reagan, and James A. Farley and Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Where Mr. Axelrod honed and protected the idealism that defined Mr. Obama’s 2008 campaign, he has been an important force driving the combativeness of Mr. Obama’s campaign of 2012, embodying how their hope to change the system has given way to a more traditional reliance on partisan muscle in this, their final campaign together.

It is through Mr. Axelrod that the story of Mr. Obama’s perhaps inevitable evolution can best be tracked. Those who know Mr. Axelrod say that he, like Mr. Obama, is a man of ideals but also a street fighter who wants to win — and has proved himself willing to take off the gloves in these closing weeks of the campaign to protect his friend’s legacy before Mr. Axelrod heads off to start an academic institute dedicated to his craft at the University of Chicago.

On any given day his mustachioed face can be seen on national television calling Mr. Romney the “most secretive” candidate since Richard M. Nixon, an “outsourcer in chief” and, more recently, “a parrot.”

Making fun this week of Mr. Romney’s bid to make last-minute inroads in the perceived Obama strongholds of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Minnesota, he promised on the MSNBC program “Morning Joe” to “shave off my mustache of 40 years if we lose any of those three states.”

A joke but also a statement of how personally Mr. Axelrod takes Mr. Obama’s re-election, the failure of which would bring a crushing end to what had been the pride of Mr. Axelrod’s career, shepherding to the White House the nation’s first African-American president.

Friends said that he took Mr. Obama’s widely panned showing in the first presidential debate this year harder than he let on, “carrying the weight of it,” as one colleague put it in an interview this week, and redoubled his efforts to ensure Mr. Obama brought more focus the second time.

Yet Mr. Axelrod also gets credit for playing a critical role in bringing Mr. Obama as far as he did until then, overcoming so much drag from the slowly recovering economy.

Photo

Mr. Axelrod talking to reporters in Boca Raton, Fla., after the final presidential debate. Friends said he took the first debate harder than he let on.Credit
Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

He and his colleagues did that in large part through a long-running and hard-hitting campaign to cast Mr. Romney as a job-killing plutocrat while promoting Mr. Obama as the true champion of the middle class.

“David enjoys it all the time, playing hardball politics,” said William Daley, the former White House chief of staff who helped recruit Mr. Axelrod some 25 years ago to run his brother Richard’s first successful mayoral race. Speaking of the president, Mr. Daley added, “When he’s got to do it, he can do it, and enjoy it.”

Mr. Axelrod bristles at such descriptions. And when asked if his approach has helped open the campaign to charges that it has abandoned its promises of high-minded politics, Mr. Axelrod can show flashes of indignation, arguing that Mr. Obama’s opponents have played a role since the primaries, if not since the start of his presidency.

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“You know, their whole predicate was negative; the whole predicate was ‘fire the president,’ ” Mr. Axelrod said. “He’s the president of the United States, he’s been around the block. But was he going to sit there and take that? No. And neither were we.”

Mr. Axelrod has been called the keeper of Mr. Obama’s narrative since at least before his last presidential campaign formally began.

But this year his job has been more about protecting the president’s legacy, slashing at Mr. Romney and presenting a case for Mr. Obama’s re-election based on arguments that Stephanie Cutter, the deputy campaign manager, described as “wholly grounded in fighting for the middle class.”

She and other aides pointed to nonattack ads that Mr. Axelrod has put his time into this year. One, called “Go,” ran heavily earlier this year and was about the work Mr. Obama did to return the economy from the depths of the recession, as well as his decision to sign off on the killing of Osama bin Laden.

And Mr. Axelrod’s colleagues described him as often setting the limits on how far to go against Mr. Romney without diminishing the president’s own standing.

“He stops us from doing a bunch of things that are typical back and forth campaign stuff that isn’t in the president’s voice,” said Jim Messina, Mr. Obama’s campaign manager.

In interviews, Mr. Axelrod’s colleagues said he would often weigh in to give an argument more heft — for instance, embracing the use of the term “Romnesia” to describe Mr. Romney’s changes in position, but making sure it included a larger argument that his overall policies were more conservative than he was letting on, said his fellow campaign strategist Larry Grisolano. (That did not keep Mr. Romney’s campaign from charging that Mr. Obama’s campaign was resorting to petty attacks in lieu of a second-term agenda to run on.)

But at other times, Mr. Axelrod said, the president pulled him back. “He’s killed ads,” Mr. Axelrod said, without elaborating.

As breakfast came toward an end, Mr. Axelrod was asked how the president felt about what was seen as one of his campaign’s toughest ads, in which Mr. Romney is shown singing “America the Beautiful” off key as the screen flashed information about his offshore investments.

“Well, it aired,” he said.

A version of this article appears in print on November 2, 2012, on Page A11 of the New York edition with the headline: The Man Who Wields a Lead-Weighted Beanbag for Obama. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe